Well Hello there

[coto29]

HI

[SASS]

Chances are the grade is correct.  I know this b/c you believe you just happen to be the person designated to get the bad grade instead of owning up to a poorly written paper.  The best advice I have for you is to fix this immediately.  Go talk to your professor and see what you missed and what the prof suggests you improve on.  If you don't want to talk to the prof for some reason, most schools have some writing centers or upperclassman advisers for writing you can ask for help from.  Good luck.

[lyre]

I'd start by going to your professor to ask for help on how you can improve.  If you aren't satisfied with their suggestions, maybe go to another legal writing prof to get help from them (although some professors won't help other profs' students because they don't want to step on any toes).

[BikePilot]

Grades are almost always given out as relative to the rest of the class.  There's no way anyone else could verify your grade without also reading all of the other memos submitted.

[brewha]

Your professor didn't throw darts at a pile of papers and assign the poor grades to the ones she/he hit.  Your professor gave the poor grades, mandatory or not, to the worst papers in the bunch.  Law school grading is all relative to your other classmates, regardless of the class.  Your policy, while seemingly harsh, is based on your work relative to your other classmates.  You need to do better on your next assignment to get out of the "mandatory" 3 low grades.

[byebyeny]

What grade did you get? I know at my school professors are supposed to give out C-'s or below to about 10 percent of first year class. That's the rule. The funny thing is, professor really don't want to give C-'s to ANYONE. They know that law is hard and people need time to study and improve eventually, but school policy is set that way so that they will rank higher. For instance, I received a C- from a class that I thought I totally failed,(left almost half of the test clean, untouched). Really, I should have failed that test, but the professor gave me a C-(which COULD have been a C, a passable grade in many other schools with more lenient curve). It really is unfair that someone has to get the bad grade. I wouldn't worry too much about it unless your grade fell below 2.0 like how mine did, but still, it is unfair that some schools almost never fail out any students because their policy is much more lenient. People tend to justify such rules by saying, 'oh well, even if you pass with 2.0, you still won't pass the bar' I think this is total BS. How then do you justify lower ranked public schools that have 95 bar pass rate (and fails out nobody) as opposed to 2nd tier private schools that have 10 percent attrition rate due to their policy and still can't manage to keep their bar passage rate over 80 percent?

[Dr. Balsenschaft]

It is dangerous to make those assumptions about me or my rational.  

Why is it dangerous?  Did you overstate your arguments like this in your memo?  This sentence immediately made me think you're an idiot.  If you wrote stuff like this in your memo, it could explain why you failed.  Nothing is truly arbitrary.  You may have an annoying legal writing style that makes you sound like a moron to anyone but you.  Or maybe not, I don't know.  Why don't you just post a few pages of your memo in this forum and then we'll tell you what we think?

[brewha]

I'm telling you, its not as clean cut as at most schools.  I've gotten a bad grade before and not reacted this way.  It is not my ego.  I'll give an example:  on the syllabus all out of class assignments count for 5 percent of the total grade and there were bout 20.  As such, all papers being even, I get an NP rather than a P ( the only grades given) because I was late on an out of class assignment. Has nothing to do with my paper. And I want an independent source to make sure it has nothing to do with my paper.  Its not like I got a "C", it is more akin to pass/fail. The arbitrariness is astounding.  I mentioned the guy who asked his prof why he got a bad grade and was told: "must happen to somebody" by his prof..  He didn't deserve his grade either.  This happened to 25 percent of the class.  

You are making less and less sense as you continue to post in this thread and it is becoming increasingly apparent why you did poorly.  You receiving an NP because you turned in an assignment late isn't arbitraty at all... it's completely expected.  You turn in a late assignment, you get penalized.  

Regarding the random tale of your classmate - your professor is absolutely right that receiving a low grade "must happen to somebody." You've already mentioned that is the school's policy.  Guess what?  Your classmate turned in a horrible paper.  If getting a low grade "must happen to somebody," it is going to happen to the students that turn in garbage; and it did.  

[Thane Messinger]

I got a bad grade in Legal Research and Writing and think I was short changed by a new prof.  Someone had to get a bad grade and it ended up being me.  Is there a way for me to have this memo graded by someone else unofficially, for peace of mind at least.  Please help.  Thanks in advance.

For the future, the best source I've read on writing excellent memos is from Morten Lund, in Jagged Rocks of Wisdom--The Memo: Mastering the Legal Memorandum.

It's an excellent source to anyone in law school (for the LR&W course) and, more importantly, for one's first law job.

[cooleylawstudent]

I noticed you changed your resonce to "Hi" as if none of the responces below would still be evidence of what you had actually written(fools proof for sure!)

Anyways, like I said before.....the real reason your trying to transfer and the the true answer to why you can't.